Diamond sheds light on basic building blocks of life

Diamond sheds light on basic building blocks of life

The UK’s national synchrotron facility, Diamond Light Source, is now the first and only place in Europe where pathogens requiring Containment Level 3 – including serious viruses such as those responsible for AIDS, Hepatitis and some types of flu – can be analysed at atomic and molecular level using synchrotron light. This special light allows scientists to study virus structures at intense levels of detail and this new facility extends that capability to many viruses that have a major global impact on human and animal health. Studying pathogens in this way has the potential to open up new paths for the development of therapeutic treatments and vaccines.Presenting at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS 2013) in Boston on the latest virus work undertaken at Diamond, Prof Dave Stuart – Life Sciences Director at Diamond Light Source and Professor of Structural Biology at Oxford University – launches the new lab, Crystal, which will help scientists delve into the inner workings of pathogens and uncover the mechanisms of infection.

Prof. Stuart comments: “Crystal provides unique facilities in Europe for the study of serious viruses. Nowhere in the world can structures be so readily solved with the speed and efficiency that is now available at Diamond. As such, we anticipate interest from a number of groups in the UK, including the Particle Imaging Centre in Oxford, which provides a suite of contained laboratories including a crystallisation laboratory, to support the preparation of sample prior to study at Diamond. This is great news for the UK research community, as the facility will be a resource with the potential to provide new pathways for treatment.”

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An Anglo-Chinese collaboration used the facilities at Diamond to solve the structure of the Human Enterovirus 71 (EV71), which is the root cause of the disease. Using synchrotron light, the team were able to visualise the virus in different states and collect a series of structures, from which they were able to uncover a detailed picture of the virus’s actions in sequence – rather than being a rigid object, the virus appears to actually “breathe”. Such visualisation requires specialist microscopes ten thousand times more powerful than standard laboratory microscopes.

It looks like they can get some very highly magnified images of some very nasty viruses. Hopefully this will lead to progress in fighting them.